In Junkyards on Feathered Things
by Loki's Scribe
Summary: While Bobby attempts to figure out how long that witch got him stuck with a de-aged Team Free Will, Dean's attention is turned more towards the possibilities presented by a friend with wings.


_Characters not mine._

_(Originally written for a kiddies challenge at comment_fic. Prompt was "kid!Dean helps kid!Cas learn to fly using his wings." As soon as I figured out the logistics of getting them, as kids, into the same millennium, it kind of exploded.)_

* * *

Castiel stared off into the middle distance, contemplating the treeline. "I'm not certain this is a good idea, Dean."

"How's it a bad one, then?" Dean wanted to know. He swung his legs over the side of the truck's roof, tapping at the window absently with one heel. Cas glanced down at. One of his shoelaces was untied, but somehow Castiel doubted that Dean would care if he pointed it out.

"Someone could get hurt," he said instead.

Dean wrinkled his nose. "You afraid of falling?" he asked, but his voice was a little softer, now.

Cas hesitated, because the honest answer to that was _Not exactly_. He was pretty certain he remembered the right tecnhique for getting and remaining airborne. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could remember how Gabriel had shown him an eternity ago. If he thought hard enough, he could feel the archangel's phantom fingers adjusting the takeoff position, even, although the memory of a brother touching his wings made him slightly uncomfortable. But though he knew, at least academically, how to get in the air and stay in the air, he couldn't for the life of him remember how to land.

He glanced down. He and Dean were perched on the roof of a truck in Bobby's yard, the highest place either of them could find. Well, there were trees around, too, but Castiel had objected to trees because they had too many branches and leaves sticking out at irregular angles for him to really feel as though he could spread his wings. Dean also appeared to believe that flying was as simple as jumping off of something and flapping his wings really hard. "The ground is hard," he said instead, because that was a fairly good summation of what he was nervous about.

Dean gave it an obligatory glance. "Shouldn't be bad from this height," he said. "And what's the point of _having_ wings if you can't dive bomb the bad guys or get out of range?"

Castiel cocked his head and considered it. It was not a question with a ready answer. "I'm sure my Father gave them to me for some other purpose," he said finally. "And I see no bad guys here."

Dean rolled his eyes and said, with exaggerated patience, "Well, yeah, Cas, but you gotta _practice_ if you wanna be quick about it when there are."

Cas blinked. It sounded sensible. Or at least, it probably would have if it hadn't come out of the mouth of Dean Winchester. There was a mischievous glint in the boy's smile that Cas couldn't quite unravel the meaning of. "Bobby told us to stay out of trouble?" he said uncertainly.

"Yeah."

"Are you certain that flying practice does not constitute getting into trouble?" Castiel asked.

"I'm sure Bobby didn't mean that you weren't supposed to fly."

Castiel thought that, perhaps, there was some reason that Dean would be so specific in his answer, but before he had a chance to answer, the entire conversation was derailed by a third voice. "What're you two doing up there?"

Dean looked down at his little brother, who was standing by the driver's side door and craning up to see them. "We're just talking, Sammy," he answered. "I thought you were staying with Bobby."

Sam wrinkled his nose. "He tole me to go out and play with you two before it got dark."

Dean sighed. Castiel thought it likely Bobby was the only being here who was making any sense. After all, Bobby was doing research and did not need to be looking after a six-year-old child while he was at it, not when he and Dean were certainly capable of keeping Sam entertained for a few hours.

"Did he tell you anything _else_?" Dean asked.

"Only that it might take awhile."

Dean swore. Castiel winced, although he understood how much Dean wanted to be an adult who protected people again. Sam was unfazed.

"And I know you're not just talkin' up there," Sam added. "What're doing that I'm not s'posed to know about?"

Dean stared at him for a moment, and it was obvious his thoughts were racing behind his eyes. Castiel watched him, waiting for some kind of a cue. He remembered, although neither of the Winchesters had ever explicitly told him, that the last time Sam was six and Dean was ten, that there had been many things that Sam was not supposed to know about. Sam knew about them now, of course - sort of. The spell used to turn the three of them into children had left them with more impressions than memories of their adult lives, although Cas remembered more details than the humans. Dean was clearly debating how much Sam needed to know about angels.

"He knows I am an angel of the Lord, Dean," Cas said. "I'm certain I would have told him."

"Yeah, but that was back when we were grown up." Dean shot him the evil eye. Castiel remembered that Dean didn't appreciate anyone inserting themselves between him and his little brother, and duly shut up.

After a moment, though, Dean looked back down at Sam. "Cas only sort of remembers how to fly."

* * *

It had been Sam who had called Bobby back at the motel. They were kids again, and they didn't really know what had happened, only that something had gone very, very wrong, and Castiel remembered that there had been a witch. So as soon as Sam had found his cell phone, he'd scrolled through the numbers, and Bobby's was the name he recognized.

Bobby had been half-expecting the call when he picked up the phone. "That you boys in trouble again?"

He hadn't been expecting the frightened child's voice that answered. "Uncle Bobby?"

Bobby did know that voice, and fairly well, but he hadn't heard it in over twenty years. It had taken him a moment to get his bearings back. "_Sam_?"

The answer was barely a whisper. "Yeah."

"You boys all right?" Bobby knew damn well that they weren't, obviously, not if Sam sounded as young as he did, but it would help to know if any of them were hurt, and to make sure that Dean was there with him.

Dean was. Bobby knew not because Sam answered the question, but because he heard the other Winchester's muffled voice on the other end of the line. "That Bobby? Sam, give me the phone." Then Sam squeaked in protest when his brother took it from him and said, in a much clearer voice now that he was talking into the receiver, "Bobby, something . . . something bad happened. I don't know what. But I don't know where Dad is and Cas, who's the other kid here with us, said something about a witch - "

"Woah. Slow down, son," Bobby interrupted. That kid always did talk a mile a minute, and he didn't always know what the important details were. "The angel's with you?"

That brought Dean up short. "What?"

Bobby bit back a growl, because if Dean was that young again, then he might not remember anything _but_ being that age. "Castiel. Castiel is with you?"

"Yes."

Bobby mentally scanned Dean's outburst again. _The other kid with us,_ he'd said. "How old is he?"

"I don't know. Maybe my age?" Dean was thoroughly derailed.

"All right," Bobby said. He wanted to know if the witch previously mentioned had turned the angel back into a fledgling or if it had merely managed to turn his vessel into a child again, but it wasn't a question Dean wasn't going to have a damn clue. And he wasn't certain he wanted to unravel an explanation from Castiel - whether it was from the adult angel or a fledgling - and said instead, "Tell me what happened."

Dean gave the answer like a report, but it didn't amount to much. He couldn't really remember anything before he'd come to in an abandoned house in clothes too big for him, with Sam and Cas nearby. Cas had told them that there was a witch about, and Dean said he trusted the other boy, although his voice wavered a little there like he wasn't so sure why. And then he asked Bobby if he had any idea where his damn daddy had gotten off to.

"Never mind that," Bobby snapped. "Where are you?"

Dean gave him a town only about an hour's drive from Bobby's place.

"I know _that_, boy. Where in town are you? I'm comin' to get ya."

He hung up and grabbed his keys almost as soon as Dean had given him the address. The Winchesters knew how to hole up, and he didn't think they were in any immediate danger, but the sooner he got there, the more likely the trail was to be fresh if that witch had run for the hills. And it was possible that the spell she'd cast had been set to a timer to give her enough time for a getaway, but it was also possible he was going to have to kill her to get the grown up boys back.

* * *

Bobby knew the minute he got into the motel that what he was doing was taking the boys home and _then_ worrying about the witch. Castiel had been the one to open the door, because Dean was not going more than five feet from a half-asleep Sam. Bobby glanced at them and back at the angel. It had sounded as though these boys were set to hunker down _together_ when he'd hung up, but the way Dean was glaring daggers at the angel meant something had changed.

"Dean was upset when I told him I ought to go back to Heaven and see if any other angels knew how to reverse the effects," Castiel explained.

"You wanted to leave in the middle of an emergency?" Bobby asked. "Idjit."

"I thought it would be helpful," Castiel answered, then looked down at his bare feet. All three of the boys were dressed in nothing but oversize t-shirts, since none of their normal clothes would fit kids of about six and ten. "I'm afraid I could not get off the ground."

Bobby glanced back at where his wings would be, if Castiel cared to pull them onto the physical plane. "They hurt?" he asked.

The angel shook his head. "I just cannot move them properly. I fear the witch may have - "

"You're a kid again," Bobby said. It made the most sense, because that meant it was the same spell. But to turn an angel back into a fledgling, even temporarily, took a _damned_ powerful witch. The shit had really hit the fan with this one.

He moved farther into the room to talk to Dean and Sam. Dean and Castiel had spent most of that hour comparing notes, and had come to the conclusion that the witch had done something to their memories, because they clearly knew each other from somewhere. Bobby had gone ahead and just told them exactly what happened at that point, because in his experience the Winchesters got into considerably more trouble when they only sort of understood what was going on rather than having it properly explained.

Then he'd made a run to Wal-Mart to guess at jean- and shoe-sizes so that he could get two fully-clothed Winchesters into the backseat and sit a fledgling-freakin' angel in the passenger side with him, because Cas clearly remembered the most and he wanted to be able to think it through on the drive.

That had been the previous night. Bobby had done some reading since then, and was beginning to suspect that the spell would wear off on its own after a few weeks, so he wasn't facing the prospect of hunting down this absurdly powerful witch on his own. But just to make sure, he kicked Sam out the door to go bother his brother while he made a few phone calls.

* * *

Once he'd explained that Cas was having flying practice, it had been all but impossible to get Sam to go away, and Dean hadn't objected that much to his little brother climbing into the truck bed to watch. After all, superheroes flew, right? So that made Cas kind of a superhero, or it would if he could actually do it properly. (Dean was ignoring Cas's angel-ness. Angels were all dicks, and Cas wasn't a dick, even if he had tried to take off after Bobby had told them to stay put.) "So what now?" Dean asked.

Castiel sighed. "I am not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?"

"Look, if you don't _want_ to be able to fly - "

"No." Cas closed his eyes. "I want to fly again. I would just rather not fall, Dean, and I can't garauntee I know how to land."

"Oh." Dean considered the problem. "Come back here, then. I'll grab you . . . kind of anchor you, you know? If you don't remember how."

"I could pull you off of the truck," Cas pointed out, as though it were a life-threatening problem with this plan and not just the possibility of a few interesting bruises.

Dean glanced down. The truck was parked on dirt not gravel, and dirt that had been scuffed up pretty recently rather than ground in. "Not too far to fall. We'll be _fine_."

Cas glanced behind him and, hesitantly, pulled his wings onto the physical plane. He ruffled them slightly, and Dean only barely managed to keep his hands to himself and not smooth down the rumpled spots. "I'm not certain."

"I am. You're not gonna get hurt, Cas."

Cas looked at him and cocked his head slightly, like a confused puppy. He looked more like a lost puppy than usual - there was something odd about seeing him in a t-shirt and jeans slightly too big for him. Dean couldn't really remember what, because it made him look like a normal kid, except for those enormous dark feathery wings sticking out behind him. Maybe angels weren't supposed to look like normal kids. "All right," he said. "I trust you." Then, after a moment. "Get into the bed with Sam. I will knock you off if I spread my wings with you on the roof."

"You spread 'em that wide before you jump?" Dean asked.

Sam wrinkled his nose at his older brother. "'Course he does. Ever watched birds fly?" he said, with all the authority of a six-year-old with a nature guide.

While it was pretty clear that Sam was talking to Dean, Cas shook his head gravely. "No, I have not. But I cannot imagine my Father changed the basic wing design all that much since it worked so well for angels."

Sam blinked, then turned back to Dean. "They flap, _then_ fly," he said.

Dean shrugged and slid off the roof of the cab and into the bed.

Cas crouched alone on the roof, muttering under his breath for a moment or two. Then his dark wings flapped a time or two and, after a moment, Dean watched his friend lift into the air.

* * *

It came back rather easily, for Castiel. In the back of his mind he could hear older angels talking him through it - mostly Gabriel, because there was something about Dean's mischief that reminded him of the Messenger's gentler moods. It was awkward, especially at first, because he couldn't seem to remember how to go higher and no matter how hard he pressed on the air, he was still brushing the roofs of cars as he flapped.

Then his irritation dislodged a memory of learning how to tilt his wings just so. . . .

He could clear anything he wanted to, now.

Cas glanced back to see Sam staring at him wide-eyed, and Dean climbing back onto the roof of the cab to get a better view, grinning. And even though he knew there was no way Dean could see him, Castiel smiled back.

He took a few loops of the yard, trying to remember how he had learned how to land, before he remembered what Gabriel had told him: "You fly low and take a few rough landings until you figure it out, little bro. I'm not going to tell you _everything_."

Oh.

There was enough detritus in the yard that he didn't really want to land on his own, and he did trust Dean's promise, so he started back to the truck with the Winchester's perched on it. "Dean!"

He dipped lower as he shouted it, and as soon as he was close enough, Dean made a grab for him. The other boy got ahold of his shirt, and then his waist, but he wasn't big enough or fast enough to stop Cas's momentum. Cas winched his wings as quickly as he could, but still felt the feathers ruck up slightly against the body of the vehicle as he and Dean tumbled backwards in a tangle of limbs. It hurt, but not much.

Sam moved fast, but still let out an indignant yelp when his brother's shoulder connected with his foot.

For a moment, the two older boys just lay in the bed panting. "There," Dean said, shoving Cas off of him. "Wasn't so bad."

Cas sniffed and sat up, trying to recover what was left of his dignity. "If you say so, Dean."

Before any of them said anything else, Bobby bellowed across the yard, "I'm locking this house up once it's dark whether you boys are in it or not! You never know what might be out there!"

Castiel looked back at Dean, who was giving the house a skeptical look with one raised eyebrow. "We should go in," the angel observed.

"Nah," Dean answered, shrugging. "'S _Bobby_. He'll lock up all right, but he'll come out and chase us in first. You wanna try that landing thing one more time?"

Cas blinked. He was certain Dean must have gotten mildly bruised when he'd knocked them over.

Sam, however, had recovered. "That was cool. What'd it feel like? Can you carry things when you fly like that?"

"I . . . can," Cas answered, not entirely certain which question it was he ought to be answering first. Sam seemed full of them, and had at least since he had been turned back into a child. "People, even."

"Will you take me or Dean?"

"Hold on," Dean growled. "You're not goin' up there with Cas unless I know he's not gonna drop you."

Sam pouted, then changed tactics, turning to Castiel. "Will you take Dean up to make sure?" he asked.

Castiel hesitated. But it was clear that the Winchesters were not going inside until Bobby made them, it _had_ felt good to fly, and there were probably a good five minutes before Bobby came out to get them. He was also not entirely certain what to do with a little brother's puppy eyes trained on him. It was not something that he'd had the opportunity to be on the receiving end of very often. "I could," he said finally.

"I seem to remember hating to fly Angel Air," Dean said, edging away.

Possibly because it was an opportunity to bother his big brother, Sam had a sudden attack of memory. "Yeah, but you haven't flown with him like _this_," he answered. "I'd've remembered something that looked that cool."

Dean opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he grumbled, "Flying people _fall_."

"I do not," Castiel observed.

Dean seemed to curl into himself a little.

Castiel slid across the bed of the truck and gently touched Dean's arm. "I assure you I will not drop you, Dean," he said quietly. And then, because he knew the words held some power with the Winchesters, added, "I promise."

Dean looked up at him. "I trust you, Cas. Really, I do. But. . . ."

* * *

Five minutes later, Bobby came out to yell at the boys for not getting their butts back in the house and only had one thing to say. "_Dean! Castiel! What the hell d'you think you're doin_'?"


End file.
